Friday, November 30, 2007
The Earth is warming, but it isn't your fault...
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Grasping the magnitude of Ice Age glaciation is possible today only on Earth's two extant polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. During the final Ice Age push, ice sheets up to nearly two miles thick covered much of America. Believe it! We Hoosiers who are living in a period of relative warmth have built houses where once existed only huge sheets of ice.
Because the amount of water in Earth's hydrosphere is constant - it is a closed system - the storage of water in the great ice sheets caused sea levels to fall. A lot. During the late Wisconsinan glacial episode, so much of the Earth's water supply was locked up in enormous ice masses that the sea level fell some 280 to 350 feet below today's level, exposing vast areas of land formerly under water. Continental shelves are shallow submarine plains that border continents and typically end in steep slopes to an oceanic abyss. Where a wide continental shelf slopes gradually, a small drop in sea level can cause a great increase in shoreline areas. Conversely, a small increase in sea level can inundate large swaths of land.
The result of the late Wisconsinan glaciation here in North America was a continuous land bridge that stretched between Siberia and Alaska. Legends tell of Lyonesse in the British Isles. If the semi-legendary western realm of Arthur is imaginary, the land itself is not, as Saxon records tell of the drowning of Lyonesse in 1099 due to, erm, rising sea levels.
Sea level now rises an average of one foot per century because global warming is melting the great polar ice masses of the Arctic and Antarctic. Before you picture future global conditions as the set for a crappy Kevin Costner movie, keep in mind that because the hydrosphere is a closed sytem, there is an upper limit to how high sea level can rise. A greenhouse effect and loss of stratospheric ozone may possibly have increased the rate of global warming recently, but attributing this to human activity is pure speculation because evidence suggests much higher concentrations of so-called greenhouse gasses many times in the past.
The temperature of the earth has been much warmer in times past. Bear in mind, there were once boreal forests. In eons past, before the coming of the ice, land where Hoosiers currently build houses was the bed of a shallow sea.
The current scare-mongering is nothing more or less than a scheme to separate you from your money and your freedom. Always remember that the same folks who are bemoaning anthropogenic global warming today were sounding the death knell for civilization in the chilly grip of the coming Ice Age, which, as I recall, was supposedly caused by human activity also.
Many of these are the same elitist control freaks who seem to think the solution to most of the world's problems are less people and have been doing their damnedest to remove as many as possible of the world's undesirables through eugenics, abortion and various scemes involving ovens and gas chambers and whatnot.
Relax. There isn't a durn thing you can do about global warming. Even if we in the US were to utterly destroy our standard of living on the way to zero emissions, the developing world - including the two most populous nations on the planet - far outspew our comparatively paltry output anyway.
Learn more at http://www.sepp.org/
All those poor polar bears will just have to take up residence on shore. Or evolve into cetaceans.
Grasping the magnitude of Ice Age glaciation is possible today only on Earth's two extant polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. During the final Ice Age push, ice sheets up to nearly two miles thick covered much of America. Believe it! We Hoosiers who are living in a period of relative warmth have built houses where once existed only huge sheets of ice.
Because the amount of water in Earth's hydrosphere is constant - it is a closed system - the storage of water in the great ice sheets caused sea levels to fall. A lot. During the late Wisconsinan glacial episode, so much of the Earth's water supply was locked up in enormous ice masses that the sea level fell some 280 to 350 feet below today's level, exposing vast areas of land formerly under water. Continental shelves are shallow submarine plains that border continents and typically end in steep slopes to an oceanic abyss. Where a wide continental shelf slopes gradually, a small drop in sea level can cause a great increase in shoreline areas. Conversely, a small increase in sea level can inundate large swaths of land.
The result of the late Wisconsinan glaciation here in North America was a continuous land bridge that stretched between Siberia and Alaska. Legends tell of Lyonesse in the British Isles. If the semi-legendary western realm of Arthur is imaginary, the land itself is not, as Saxon records tell of the drowning of Lyonesse in 1099 due to, erm, rising sea levels.
Sea level now rises an average of one foot per century because global warming is melting the great polar ice masses of the Arctic and Antarctic. Before you picture future global conditions as the set for a crappy Kevin Costner movie, keep in mind that because the hydrosphere is a closed sytem, there is an upper limit to how high sea level can rise. A greenhouse effect and loss of stratospheric ozone may possibly have increased the rate of global warming recently, but attributing this to human activity is pure speculation because evidence suggests much higher concentrations of so-called greenhouse gasses many times in the past.
The temperature of the earth has been much warmer in times past. Bear in mind, there were once boreal forests. In eons past, before the coming of the ice, land where Hoosiers currently build houses was the bed of a shallow sea.
The current scare-mongering is nothing more or less than a scheme to separate you from your money and your freedom. Always remember that the same folks who are bemoaning anthropogenic global warming today were sounding the death knell for civilization in the chilly grip of the coming Ice Age, which, as I recall, was supposedly caused by human activity also.
Many of these are the same elitist control freaks who seem to think the solution to most of the world's problems are less people and have been doing their damnedest to remove as many as possible of the world's undesirables through eugenics, abortion and various scemes involving ovens and gas chambers and whatnot.
Relax. There isn't a durn thing you can do about global warming. Even if we in the US were to utterly destroy our standard of living on the way to zero emissions, the developing world - including the two most populous nations on the planet - far outspew our comparatively paltry output anyway.
Learn more at http://www.sepp.org/
All those poor polar bears will just have to take up residence on shore. Or evolve into cetaceans.
Labels: global warming
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